Miles Reid is well known for his contributions to algebraic geometry, in which he has been an influential figure. His early work advanced the theory of surfaces of general type, especially those with vanishing genera. Together with Shigefumi Mori, he laid the foundations for the theory of minimal models of threefolds and the classification of higher dimensional varieties. He has developed important new relations between the geometry of algebraic varieties and commutative ring theory, with implications also for representation theory and theoretical physics.